by Paul Kearney
There was laughter in the firing line, a low dark murmur of it as the Space Marines lined up their targets in their helmet displays and the deadly muzzles of the bolters jumped up blazing fire in their hands. The first wave of orks was brought down thirty yards from the firing line, and as the xenos died, so the Ultramarines stood up, switched to three-round bursts and began sweeping the second wave that was now charging forward over the humped bodies of their own dead.
The orks came on with a diabolical fury that had in it no notion of fear, no hesitation. One used the body of its fellow as a springboard to leap high in the air and come down almost within the perimeter, but Brother Gamelan wheeled round and turned it into a burning torch with a bright blast from his flamer. It wriggled and struggled until he put a bolt-pistol round through its skull, and the light from the burning ork lit up the Ultramarine position as though they were fighting around a central bonfire.
The second wave died. But there was a third, following on right after, and this made it right up to the position, and all around Calgar his brothers were firing point-blank into the gaping maws of the creatures. One Space Marine was lifted into the air by the foe but he stabbed the muzzle of his bolter into the creature’s eye and opened up with a burst that blasted the thing’s head clean from its shoulders, dropping him on the ground again to fight on, his blue armour painted vivid steaming scarlet with ork blood.
It was hand to hand up and down the line, and in the close-quarter battle the strength of the orks told. Calgar saw a Guardsman torn open like a rotten sack in the fists of one roaring xenos, seconds before Proxis’ axe clove it from shoulder to crotch. It fell in two struggling pieces to the ground and the Ancient slashed it up further, as calm as a man chopping wood.
Now Calgar allowed himself to step into the fray. A wide burst from his storm bolters cleared the front of the position, the heavy rounds dismembering half a dozen of the enemy, and as more hurtled towards him he set up a great, joyous shout, and with the Gauntlets of Ultramar pulsing and shining on his fists he plunged into the thickest part of the melee.
The artificer armour magnified his own immense strength, and the disruptive field that encircled his fists tore the foe to pieces in his hands. ‘Guilliman!’ he shouted, and he hurled the orks aside left and right in bloody gobbets and broken steaming remnants. He broke clear through the attacking line, shattered it like some blue juggernaut of slaughter, and cast aside his enemies like so much chaff.
Even the mindless savagery of the orks could not withstand that blinding blur of murder. The enemy broke and began streaming away from the Ultramarines, and up to Calgar’s side came Proxis and Orhan, wielding their power axes to terrible effect. The three of them pursued the fleeing orks, tearing them off their feet, slashing them apart and trampling their dying faces underfoot.
Finally, Calgar caught sight of a lone trio of larger creatures to the rear of their attacking line, a huge ork chieftain and his bodyguards. As the ork saw Calgar it opened its jaws and bellowed hatred and defiance, but there was recognition in the savage scarlet eyes also. As Calgar pointed the Gauntlets’ storm bolters at it, the ork chieftain shoved its underlings into harm’s way and took off at a sprint. The storm bolters roared out and chewed up the two unfortunates into bright spattered gore, but their leader ducked behind a tree, and became a shadow flitting through the jungle. Calgar followed it with well-aimed volleys, but the ork had luck on its side, and the Chapter Master ceased firing to conserve his weapon’s precious ammunition, watching the shadow disappear into the shocked silence of the fetid jungle.
The attack fell apart, the orks broken and running in ragged knots and skeins that were methodically shot to pieces by the Ultramarines. A last few barking rounds, and then a quiet fell, strange and unlooked for after the roaring chaos that had gone before. Calgar drew a deep breath and shook his dripping gauntlets free of clotted blood. A momentary flick of the disruption field and the ork filth was burned off them completely, leaving them inviolate again.
‘Re-form perimeter,’ he said over the vox. ‘Reload, and watch your arcs. Proxis, I want a headcount. Watch and shoot, brothers, watch and shoot.’
The Ultramarines resumed their firing positions, changed magazines, and scanned the surrounding jungle. All around them the bodies of their foes steamed and twitched. There was a single shot as one was finished off by a watchful Space Marine. The only sound after that was the crackling of the burning ork carcass in the centre of the position.
‘All brethren accounted for,’ Proxis said a minute later. ‘Three minor wounds. That is all.’
Lieutenant Janus’ young voice piped up. ‘Two dead, two wounded, my lord.’
Calgar stood like a statue of some war god made incarnate, smoke still issuing in a thin ribbon from the muzzles of his storm bolters. Beside him, Mathias unhelmed, and kissed his crozius arcanum, whose power field he had switched off at last. ‘Blessed be,’ he said. ‘This was a good accounting.’
‘One of many to come,’ Calgar said quietly.
Ten
They shifted away from the battlefield while Parsifal tended the wounded. Sergeant Avila took out a half-squad on a sweep all around the camp, and when he came back he reported that by his count some eighty-six of the enemy were lying dead about them. By the trails that led away, he estimated the strength of the warband that had attacked them at some two hundred.
‘That will grow,’ Calgar said thoughtfully as the brother-sergeant stood before him, helm off, pale skin glistening with sweat in the heat.
‘How are we for ammunition, sergeant?’
Avila’s face remained impassive except for a slight frown that creased his forehead. ‘My lord, we possess some fifteen full magazines for each battle-brother. But we are low on belts for the heavy bolters and power packs for the plasma gun.’
Calgar nodded. It was as he had suspected. A few more engagements like the last one would see them reduced to battling with knives and fists.
‘How far do you think we are from Zalathras, my lord?’ Mathias asked him, leaning on his crozius.
‘By my best estimate, at least three hundred miles.’
Mathias whistled softly. ‘My lord, we must pick up the pace, or we will be swamped before we are halfway there. This attack was only the beginning. The orks are on our trail now. The attacks will be unrelenting from here on in.’
‘I am aware of that, Brother-Chaplain,’ Calgar said.
‘My brethren are marching far more slowly than they are capable of, lord,’ Avila said. Calgar stared at him, but the sergeant did not meet his eyes.
‘The servitors and the Guardsmen,’ Brother Mathias said with a low sigh.
‘I know what it is you are thinking, Mathias – it has been on my mind also,’ Calgar said. ‘If we were Ultramarines alone, we could march day and night, and at double the pace. But I will not abandon Janus and his men. I would be leaving them to their death. Other Chapter Masters might do it without a second thought – but I am heir to great Guilliman, and do you think he would countenance such a dishonourable act?’
‘I think he might consider the greater good that would be served by your own survival,’ Mathias said. ‘Lord, we will be weeks on the trail at this rate, and Zalathras could well be lost by the time we struggle out of this infernal jungle.’
Calgar turned away. Mathias had always seen the dark logic behind every command decision more clearly than most, and like Proxis he had known his Chapter Master long enough to be able to speak his mind freely. The question had been gnawing at Calgar since the very first day’s march.
‘I will think on it,’ he said.
‘Do not think too long, lord.’
They policed the battlefield quickly, and even the Ultramarines, aware of the ammunition situation, were not above rummaging through the ork carcasses to stock up their dwindling supply. Very few of the xenos used bolters, and the rounds within those t
hat existed were crudely made, some downright unstable, but they might be glad of them one day hence.
As they marched away from the scene of the fighting, Calgar looked back, and saw to his disgust that all around the piled carcasses of the orks, hordes of tiny green fungi were already springing up. The seeds of another warband had been sown in the very soil of the planet. Such was the unending scourge of the orks.
They were attacked twice more in the next three days. Both times the assaults came out of nowhere, but were crude and uncoordinated, even by ork standards. Both attacks were beaten off with only minor injuries, but the expenditure of ammunition was becoming a real problem. As the Ultramarines manned their perimeter at night, the battle-brothers took turns unloading bolter rounds gleaned from the ill-made magazines of the orks, and wiping them down, rasping off the rough edges, then reloading them into empty magazines of their own. Many were ill-fitting, and they would no doubt cause jams aplenty, but they were a lot better than facing the enemy with brute strength alone – even Adeptus Astartes could not hope to win out against the enemy they faced if it all came down to hand-to-hand combat.
There were times, at night, when Calgar left the perimeter and walked out into the jungle alone, surprisingly quiet despite the huge bulk of his armoured form, stepping as lightly as a half-ton shadow. He looked up in rare gaps through the canopy overhead, and studied what stars he could find, aligning them in the map he carried in his head, constantly regauging their position.
There were stars that were not stars, and he watched them too, battling the fury in his hearts. Ork ships circled up there, dominating the skies of the planet and landing troops at will. He saw one once that grew into a bright torch as it descended through the thick atmosphere and landed somewhere to the east of them, lost in the jungle for a moment before coughing and blazing up into the night sky again in a flare of stuttering afterburners. The planet was being infested with the creatures, and every day that passed saw the odds against Calgar and his brethren lengthen.
They picked up the pace. Janus’ surviving storm troopers divested themselves of all equipment save their lasguns and handed it over to the Ultramarines to carry. The crippled servitor was finally abandoned, left with a single belt of ammunition so that it might go down fighting with the heavy bolter that was part of its anatomy.
They heard the long, distant rattle of it later that day, far to their rear. There was no mistaking the precision of Macragge-crafted munitions, not for the attuned ears of Ultramarines at any rate. A few minutes it fired, burst after burst, and in reply came the ragged stutter of ork guns, rising in volume until the noise suddenly cut off, and there was only the rancid chatter of the jungle creatures again.
The company marched on, the Guardsmen white-faced with fatigue at the pace now set by the Space Marines. There were times when a human trooper would faint with the extreme exertion in the shattering heat, and would regain his senses to find himself borne along in the armoured limbs of Brother Proxis, or Orhan, or occasionally carried on one arm of the Chapter Master himself. On the eleventh day, Lieutenant Janus went down, having pushed himself to the extremes of endurance ever since the crash, and he woke from a stunned stupor to find himself in the arms of Marneus Calgar. He looked up, astonished, and Calgar glanced down with a smile. ‘My lord, I must apologise,’ the young lieutenant managed to stammer.
‘Save your breath, lieutenant. Think of what a story you will have to tell one day.’
The Ultramarines were the model for the Adeptus Astartes all over the galaxy, the backbone of the Codex. Their own primarch had written it. Since that time, ten thousand years before, the various Chapters of their kind had proliferated and grown away from Roboute Guilliman’s strictures, some in small ways, others more completely.
But the Ultramarines held to the traditions of their founder, and were proud to do so. Guilliman had emphasised a side to the Adeptus Astartes that many Chapters had seen dwindle – their humanity. Superhuman the Space Marines might be, but in the last analysis they were still men, still part of mankind itself, not a species apart. And they did not look down on their fellow man as many other Space Marine Chapters did, but embraced what was left of their humanity. They did not despise the weak, or consider them expendable. That teaching above all endured in their ranks, and so it would remain.
So the hollow-eyed troopers of the Astra Militarum were not left behind. They were set a punishing pace, and they were carried when they fell, but they were not abandoned. To do so would be to violate the teachings that made the Ultramarines what they were.
They began to make night marches, for the impatience was growing in Marneus Calgar with each passing day, though to all outward appearance he was calm and impassive as always. Only those who knew him well, like Proxis, could see the intense self-control of the Chapter Master rein itself in further.
He was the overlord of a vast region of space, suzerain of a dozen worlds. He commanded great fleets and armies and his name was known and renowned clear across the galaxy among men and xenos alike. But here he was, leading a small, lost party of hounded fugitives through the depths of an unending jungle, on an unimportant world far out on the fringe of Imperium space, as cut off from his responsibilities and his command as if he had fallen through a pit in the warp.
It was maddening. It filled him with a dull, brooding anger and a raging frustration. But he clamped down on those emotions, as he did on so many others. To set an example. More than that – to discard that which could not be helped. But as he marched along in the screaming, steaming jungle day after day, a strategy began to grow in Calgar’s mind, based upon what had gone before, and what he knew of the mentality of the orks.
If, as seemed possible, the assault upon Zalidar grew into a Waaagh! then it was not only this far-out system that would be at risk. So widely separated were the fighting companies of the Ultramarines at present, that were the Waaagh! to consume Zalidar speedily enough and move on, then it would find the outlying regions of Ultramar itself before it, and heavily defended though Ultramar was with its orbital bastions and minefields and divisions of Astra Militarum, it could do untold damage before the Ultramarine companies could be recalled to repel it. More than that, the wars that the Ultramarines were currently engaged upon would have to be abandoned – some on the very brink of a successful conclusion – and that work would all have to be done again. A decade of Imperial progress could be set back.
No, the orks had to be held here, for as long as possible. They must be made to bleed, here on Zalidar, made to send in all their strength, commit everything to the taking of this world.
The world itself was not important enough to warrant such a massive commitment. Waaaghs! swept through whole systems like a storm. They did not concentrate on single planets.
Unless there were something on Zalidar that could draw them here, like iron filings to a magnet.
Something. Or someone.
If they know I am here, they will stay and fight, Calgar calculated.
My name is worth something, even out here on the Fringe. Any ork warlord would be willing to risk his entire army for the chance to fashion a drinking cup out of my skull – it would make him a legend among his kind, a name across the galaxy.
Eventually, the orks must learn that Marneus Calgar is here, on Zalidar. Once that information leaks out, the Waaagh! will concentrate here. My head is worth the conquering of a dozen border worlds. I must draw them to me, and I must make a stand here, long enough for Seventh to come, for a relieving armada to be assembled.
I must become bait, pure and simple.
And if the bait is swallowed whole, well then–
Then he would still have spared Ultramar an ork invasion, safeguarded the people he had sworn to protect. If he could hold the orks here, even if he died doing it, then he would have done his duty. Great Guilliman himself could not but approve.
On the thirteenth day the or
ks attacked, not from behind but from in front, and it was no mob of a warband that assaulted blindly this time, but a coordinated attack preceded by a fusillade of shoulder-mounted missiles. The barrage caught the front of the column in a storm of fire, felled several of the giant trees and sent wooden shrapnel clicking and slicing through the company along with its metallic counterpart. Proxis, on point, was hurled backwards ten yards by the blast and the ornamental wings were torn off his helm. Brother Castus was hit full on by one speeding missile and blown to shreds of flesh and shattered ceramite. His head, still in its helm, went flying down the column and killed one of Janus’ Guardsmen like a cannonball of old Terra.
As the dirt was still falling in showers from the explosions, so a tight-knit mob of larger orks powered forward, firing stubbers from the hip and yowling in triumphant rage. Behind them came a crowd of their lesser brethren, firing autoguns, flamers and the occasional bright lance of a melta weapon. There were hundreds of them, advancing under the trees in a mass as thick as a moving carpet.
The Ultramarines went to ground and returned fire with all the discipline and efficiency of their kind. They placed well-aimed head-shots all up and down the line, and the orks started to crumple in mounds – but there were far too many of them, and they had no notion of breaking or running this time, not so long as the larger of their kind, the leader orks, came hurtling on in a fearsome phalanx, laying down a thicket of heavy fire…
‘Brother-Sergeant Avila,’ Calgar said on the vox.
‘My lord?’
‘Hold here, at all costs. Use grenades if they close, but try to keep them at a distance for as long as you can.’
‘Acknowledged.’
‘Proxis, Orhan, Mathias, with me.’
They were at his side in moments, Proxis staggering slightly. His ornate honour guard armour was sheared and battered and blasted down to the bare metal, but still seemed to be functioning.